Man and Nature Part 26

FRAAS, _Klima und Pflanzenwelt in der Zeit_, pp. 35-38, gives, upon the authority of Link and other botanical writers, a list of the native habitats of most cereals and of many fruits, or at least of localities where these plants are said to be now found wild; but the data do not appear to rest, in general, upon very trustworthy evidence.

Theoretically, there can be little doubt that all our cultivated plants are modified forms of spontaneous vegetation, but the connection is not historically shown, nor are we able to say that the originals of some domesticated vegetables may not be now extinct and unrepresented in the existing wild flora. See, on this subject, HUMBOLDT, _Ansichten der Natur_, i, pp. 208, 209. The following are interesting incidents: "A negro slave of the great Cortez was the first who sowed wheat in New Spain. He found three grains of it among the rice which had been brought from Spain as food for the soldiers. In the Franciscan monastery at Quito, I saw the earthen pot which contained the first wheat sown there by Friar Jodoco Rixi, of Ghent. It was preserved as a relic."

The Adams of modern botany and zoology have been put to hard s.h.i.+fts in finding names for the multiplied organisms which the Creator has brought before them, "to see what they would call them;" and naturalists and philosophers have shown much moral courage in setting at naught the laws of philology in the coinage of uncouth words to express scientific ideas. It is much to be wished that some bold neologist would devise English technical equivalents for the German _verwildert_, run-wild, and _veredelt_, improved by cultivation.

[59] Could the bones and other relics of the domestic quadrupeds destroyed by disease or slaughtered for human use in civilized countries be collected into large deposits, as obscure causes have gathered together those of extinct animals, they would soon form aggregations which might almost be called mountains. There were in the United States, in 1860, as we shall see hereafter, nearly one hundred and two millions of horses, black cattle, sheep, and swine. There are great numbers of all the same animals in the British American Provinces, and in Mexico, and there are large herds of wild horses on the plains, and of tamed among the independent Indian tribes of North America. It would perhaps not be extravagant to suppose that all those cattle may amount to two thirds as many as those of the United States, and thus we have in North America a total of 170,000,000 domestic quadrupeds belonging to species introduced by European colonization, besides dogs, cats, and other four-footed household pets and pests, also of foreign origin.

If we allow half a solid foot to the skeleton and other slowly destructible parts of each animal, the remains of these herds would form a cubical ma.s.s measuring not much short of four hundred and fifty feet to the side, or a pyramid equal in dimensions to that of Cheops, and as the average life of these animals does not exceed six or seven years, the acc.u.mulations of their bones, horns, hoofs, and other durable remains would amount to at least fifteen times as great a volume in a single century. It is true that the actual ma.s.s of solid matter, left by the decay of dead domestic quadrupeds and permanently added to the crust of the earth, is not so great as this calculation makes it. The greatest proportion of the soft parts of domestic animals, and even of the bones, is soon decomposed, through direct consumption by man and other carnivora, industrial use, and employment as manure, and enters into new combinations in which its animal origin is scarcely traceable; there is, nevertheless, a large annual residuum, which, like decayed vegetable matter, becomes a part of the superficial mould; and in any event, brute life immensely changes the form and character of the superficial strata, if it does not sensibly augment the quant.i.ty of the matter composing them.

The remains of man, too, add to the earthy coating that covers the face of the globe. The human bodies deposited in the catacombs during the long, long ages of Egyptian history, would perhaps build as large a pile as one generation of the quadrupeds of the United States. In the barbarous days of old Moslem warfare, the conquerors erected large pyramids of human skulls. The soil of cemeteries in the great cities of Europe has sometimes been raised several feet by the deposit of the dead during a few generations. In the East, Turks and Christians alike bury bodies but a couple of feet beneath the surface. The grave is respected as long as the tombstone remains, but the sepultures of the ign.o.ble poor, and of those whose monuments time or accident has removed, are opened again and again to receive fresh occupants. Hence the ground in Oriental cemeteries is pervaded with relics of humanity, if not wholly composed of them; and an examination of the soil of the lower part of the _Pet.i.t Champ des Morts_ at Pera, by the naked eye alone, shows the observer that it consists almost exclusively of the comminuted bones of his fellow man.

[60] It is a.s.serted that the bones of mammoths and mastodons, in many instances, appear to have been grazed or cut by flint arrow-heads or other stone weapons. These accounts have often been discredited, because it has been a.s.sumed that the extinction of these animals was more ancient than the existence of man. Recent discoveries render it highly probable, if not certain, that this conclusion has been too hastily adopted. Lyell observes: "These stories * * must in future be more carefully inquired into, for we can scarcely doubt that the mastodon in North America lived down to a period when the mammoth coexisted with man in Europe."--_Antiquity of Man_, p. 354.

On page 143 of the volume just quoted, the same very distinguished writer remarks that man "no doubt played his part in hastening the era of the extinction" of the large pachyderms and beasts of prey; but, as contemporaneous species of other animals, which man cannot be supposed, to have extirpated, have also become extinct, he argues that the disappearance of the quadrupeds in question cannot be ascribed to human action alone.

On this point it may be observed that, as we cannot know what precise physical conditions were necessary to the existence of a given extinct organism, we cannot say how far such conditions may have been modified by the action of man, and he may therefore have influenced the life of such organisms in ways, and to an extent, of which we can form no just idea.

[61] Evelyn thought the depasturing of gra.s.s by cattle serviceable to its growth. "The biting of cattle," he remarks, "gives a gentle loosening to the roots of the herbage, and makes it to grow fine and sweet, and their very breath and treading as well as soil, and the comfort of their warm bodies, is wholesome and marvellously cheris.h.i.+ng."--_Terra, or Philosophical Discourse of Earth_, p. 36.

In a note upon this pa.s.sage, Hunter observes: "Nice farmers consider the lying of a beast upon the ground, for one night only, as a sufficient tilth for the year. The breath of graminivorous quadrupeds does certainly enrich the roots of gra.s.s; a circ.u.mstance worthy of the attention of the philosophical farmer."--_Terra_, same page.

The "philosophical farmer" of the present day will not adopt these opinions without some qualification.

[62] The rat and the mouse, though not voluntarily transported, are pa.s.sengers by every s.h.i.+p that sails from Europe to a foreign port, and several species of these quadrupeds have, consequently, much extended their range and increased their numbers in modern times. From a story of Heliogabalus related by Lampridius, _Hist. Aug. Scriptores_, ed.

Casaubon, 1690, p. 110, it would seem that mice at least were not very common in ancient Rome. Among the capricious freaks of that emperor, it is said that he undertook to investigate the statistics of the arachnoid population of the capital, and that 10,000 pounds of spiders (or spiders' webs--for aranea is equivocal) were readily collected; but when he got up a mouse show, he thought ten thousand mice a very fair number.

I believe as many might almost be found in a single palace in modern Rome. Rats are not less numerous in all great cities, and in Paris, where their skins are used for gloves, and their flesh, it is whispered, in some very complex and equivocal dishes, they are caught by legions. I have read of a manufacturer who contracted to buy of the rat catchers, at a high price, all the rat skins they could furnish before a certain date, and failed, within a week, for want of capital, when the stock of peltry had run up to 600,000.

[63] BIGELOW, _Les etats Unis en_ 1863, pp. 379, 380. In the same paragraph this volume states the number of animals slaughtered in the United States by butchers, in 1859, at 212,871,653. This is an error of the press. Number is confounded with value. A reference to the tables of the census shows that the animals slaughtered that year were estimated at 212,871,653 _dollars_; the number of head is not given. The wild horses and horned cattle of the prairies and the horses of the Indians are not included in the returns.

[64] Of this total number, 2,240,000, or nearly nine per cent., are reported as working oxen. This would strike European, and especially English agriculturists, as a large proportion; but it is explained by the difference between a new country and an old, in the conditions which determine the employment of animal labor. Oxen are very generally used in the United States and Canada for hauling timber and firewood through and from the forests; for ploughing in ground still full of rocks, stumps, and roots; for breaking up the new soil of the prairies with its strong matting of native gra.s.ses, and for the transportation of heavy loads over the rough roads of the interior. In all these cases, the frequent obstructions to the pa.s.sage of the timber, the plough, and the sled or cart, are a source of constant danger to the animals, the vehicles, and the harness, and the slow and steady step of the ox is attended with much less risk than the swift and sudden movements of the impatient horse. It is surprising to see the sagacity with which the dull and clumsy ox--hampered as he is by the rigid yoke, the most absurd implement of draught ever contrived by man--picks his way, when once trained to forest work, among rocks and roots, and even climbs over fallen trees, not only moving safely, but drawing timber over ground wholly impracticable for the light and agile horse.

Cows, so constantly employed for draught in Italy, are never yoked or otherwise used for labor in America, except in the Slave States.

[65] "About five miles from camp we ascended to the top of a high hill, and for a great distance ahead every square mile seemed to have a herd of buffalo upon it. Their number was variously estimated by the members of the party; by some as high as half a million. I do not think it any exaggeration to set it down at 200,000."--STEVENS'S _Narrative and Final Report. Reports of Explorations and Surveys for Railroad to Pacific_, vol. xii, book i, 1860.

The next day, the party fell in with a "buffalo trail," where at least 100,000 were thought to have crossed a slough.

[66] The most zealous and successful New England hunter of whom I have any personal knowledge, and who continued to indulge his favorite pa.s.sion much beyond the age which generally terminates exploits in woodcraft, lamented on his deathbed that he had not lived long enough to carry up the record of his slaughtered deer to the number of one thousand, which he had fixed as the limit of his ambition. He was able to handle the rifle, for sixty years, at a period when the game was still nearly as abundant as ever, but had killed only nine hundred and sixty of these quadrupeds, of all species. The exploits of this Nimrod have been far exceeded by prairie hunters, but I doubt whether, in the originally wooded territory of the Union, any single marksman has brought down a larger number.

[67] _Erdkunde_, viii. _Asien, 1ste Abtheilung_, pp. 660, 758.

[68] See chapter iii, _post_; also HUMBOLDT, _Ansichten der Natur_, i, p. 71. From the anatomical character of the bones of the urus, or auerochs, found among the relics of the lacustrine population of ancient Switzerland, and from other circ.u.mstances, it is inferred that this animal had been domesticated by that people; and it is stated, I know not upon what authority, in _Le Alpi che cingono l'Italia_, that it had been tamed by the Veneti also. See LYELL, _Antiquity of Man_, pp. 24, 25, and the last-named work, p. 489. This is a fact of much interest, because it is, I believe, the only known instance of the extinction of a domestic quadruped, and the extreme improbability of such an event gives some countenance to the theory of the ident.i.ty of the domestic ox with, and its descent from, the urus.

[69] In maintaining the recent existence of the lion in the countries named in the text, naturalists have, perhaps, laid too much weight on the frequent occurrence of representations of this animal in sculptures apparently of a historical character. It will not do to argue, twenty centuries hence, that the lion and the unicorn were common in Great Britain in Queen Victoria's time, because they are often seen "fighting for the crown" in the carvings and paintings of that period.

[70]

Dar nach sloger schiere, einen wisent bat elch.

Starcher bore biere. but einen grimmen schelch.

_XVI Auentiure._

The testimony of the _Nibelungen-Lied_ is not conclusive evidence that these quadrupeds existed in Germany at the time of the composition of that poem. It proves too much; for, a few lines above those just quoted, Sigfrid is said to have killed a lion, an animal which the most patriotic Teuton will hardly claim as a denizen of mediaeval Germany.

[71] The wild turkey takes readily to the water, and is able to cross rivers of very considerable width by swimming. By way of giving me an idea of the former abundance of this bird, an old and highly respectable gentleman who was among the early white settlers of the West, told me that he once counted, in walking down the northern bank of the Ohio River, within a distance of four miles, eighty-four turkeys as they landed singly, or at most in pairs, after swimming over from the Kentucky side.

[72] The wood pigeon has been observed to increase in numbers in Europe also, when pains have been taken to exterminate the hawk. The pigeons, which migrated in flocks so numerous that they were whole days in pa.s.sing a given point, were no doubt injurious to the grain, but probably less so than is generally supposed; for they did not confine themselves exclusively to the harvests for their nourishment.

[73] Pigeons were shot near Albany, in New York, a few years ago, with green rice in their crops, which it was thought must have been growing, a very few hours before, at the distance of seven or eight hundred miles.

[74] Professor Treadwell, of Ma.s.sachusetts, found that a half-grown American robin in confinement ate in one day sixty-eight earthworms, weighing together nearly once and a half as much as the bird himself, and another had previously starved upon a daily allowance of eight or ten worms, or about twenty per cent. of his own weight. The largest of these numbers appeared, so far as could be judged by watching parent birds of the same species, as they brought food to their young, to be much greater than that supplied to them when fed in the nest; for the old birds did not return with worms or insects oftener than once in ten minutes on an average. If we suppose the parents to hunt for food twelve hours in a day, and a nest to contain four young, we should have seventy-two worms, or eighteen each, as the daily supply of the brood.

It is probable enough that some of the food collected by the parents may be more nutritious than the earthworms, and consequently that a smaller quant.i.ty sufficed for the young in the nest than when reared under artificial conditions.

The supply required by growing birds is not the measure of their wants after they have arrived at maturity, and it is not by any means certain that great muscular exertion always increases the demand for nourishment, either in the lower animals or in man. The members of the English Alpine Club are not distinguished for appet.i.tes which would make them unwelcome guests to Swiss landlords, and I think every man who has had the personal charge of field or railway hands, must have observed that laborers who spare their strength the least are not the most valiant trencher champions. During the period when imprisonment for debt was permitted in New England, persons confined in country jails had no specific allowance, and they were commonly fed without stint. I have often inquired concerning their diet, and been a.s.sured by the jailers that their prisoners, who were not provided with work or other means of exercise, consumed a considerably larger supply of food than common out-door laborers.

[75] I hope Michelet has good authority for this statement, but I am unable to confirm it.

[76] Apropos of the sparrow--a single pair of which, according to Michelet, p. 315, carries to the nest four thousand and three hundred caterpillars or coleoptera in a week--I take from the _Record_, an English religious newspaper, of December 15, 1862, the following article communicated to a country paper by a person who signs himself "A real friend to the farmer:"

"_Crawley Sparrow Club._--The annual dinner took place at the George Inn on Wednesday last. The first prize was awarded to Mr. I. Redford, Worth, having destroyed within the last year 1,467. Mr. Heayman took the second with 1,448 destroyed. Mr. Stone, third, with 982 affixed. Total destroyed, 11,944. Old birds, 8,663; young ditto, 722; eggs, 2,556."

This trio of valiant fowlers, and their less fortunate--or rather less unfortunate, but not therefore less guilty--a.s.sociates, have rescued by their prowess, it may be, a score of pecks of grain from being devoured by the voracious sparrow, but every one of the twelve thousand hatched and unhatched birds, thus sacrificed to puerile vanity and ignorant prejudice, would have saved his bushel of wheat by preying upon insects that destroy the grain. Mr. Redford, Mr. Heayman, and Mr. Stone ought to contribute the value of the bread they have wasted to the fund for the benefit of the Lancas.h.i.+re weavers; and it is to be hoped that the next Byron will satirize the sparrowcide as severely as the first did the prince of anglers, Walton, in the well known lines:

"The quaint, old, cruel c.o.xcomb in his gullet Should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it."

[77] SALVAGNOLI, _Memorie sulle Maremme Toscane_, p. 143. The country about Naples is filled with slender towers fifteen or twenty feet high, which are a standing puzzle to strangers. They are the stations of the fowlers who watch from them the flocks of small birds and drive them down in to the nets by throwing stones over them. See _Appendix_, No.

14.

Tschudi has collected in his little work, _Ueber die Landwirthschaftliche Bedeutung der Vogel_, many interesting facts respecting the utility of birds, and the wanton destruction of them in Italy and elsewhere. Not only the owl, but many other birds more familiarly known as predacious in their habits, are useful by destroying great numbers of mice and moles. The importance of this last service becomes strikingly apparent when it is known that the burrows of the mole are among the most frequent causes of rupture in the dikes of the Po, and, consequently, of inundations which lay many square miles under water.--_Annales des Ponts et Chaussees_, 1847, 1re semestre, p. 150.

See also VOGT, _Nutzliche u. schadliche Thiere_.

[78] Wild birds are very tenacious in their habits. The extension of particular branches of agriculture introduces new birds; but unless in the case of such changes in physical conditions, particular species seem indissolubly attached to particular localities. The migrating tribes follow almost undeviatingly the same precise line of flight in their annual journeys, and establish themselves in the same breeding places from year to year. The stork is a strong-winged bird and roves far for food, but very rarely establishes new colonies. He is common in Holland, but unknown in England. Not above five or six pairs of storks commonly breed in the suburbs of Constantinople along the European sh.o.r.e of the narrow Bosphorus, while--much to the satisfaction of the Moslems, who are justly proud of the marked partiality of so orthodox a bird--dozens of chimneys of the true believers on the Asiatic side are crowned with his nests. See _App._ No. 15.

[79] It is not the unfledged and the nursing bird alone that are exposed to destruction by severe weather. Whole flocks of adult and strong-winged tribes are killed by hail. Severe winters are usually followed by a sensible diminution in the numbers of the non-migrating birds, and a cold storm in summer often proves fatal to the more delicate species. On the 10th of June, 184-, five or six inches of snow fell in Northern Vermont. The next morning I found a humming bird killed by the cold, and hanging by its claws just below a loose clapboard on the wall of a small wooden building where it had sought shelter.

[80] LYELL, _Antiquity of Man_, p. 409, observes: "Of birds it is estimated that the number of those which die every year equals the aggregate number by which the species to which they respectively belong is, on the average, permanently represented."

A remarkable instance of the influence of new circ.u.mstances upon birds was observed upon the establishment of a lighthouse on Cape Cod some years since. The morning after the lamps were lighted for the first time, more than a hundred dead birds of several different species, chiefly water fowl, were found at the foot of the tower. They had been killed in the course of the night by flying against the thick gla.s.s or grating of the lantern. See _Appendix_, No. 16.

Migrating birds, whether for greater security from eagles, hawks, and other enemies, or for some unknown reason, perform a great part of their annual journeys by night; and it is observed in the Alps that they follow the high roads in their pa.s.sage across the mountains. This is partly because the food in search of which they must sometimes descend is princ.i.p.ally found near the roads. It is, however, not altogether for the sake of consorting with man, or of profiting by his labors, that their line of flight conforms to the paths he has traced, but rather because the great roads are carried through the natural depressions in the chain, and hence the birds can cross the summit by these routes without rising to a height where at the seasons of migration the cold would be excessive.

The instinct which guides migratory birds in their course is not in all cases infallible, and it seems to be confounded by changes in the condition of the surface. I am familiar with a village in New England, at the junction of two valleys, each drained by a mill stream, where the flocks of wild geese which formerly pa.s.sed, every spring and autumn, were very frequently lost, as it was popularly phrased, and I have often heard their screams in the night as they flew wildly about in perplexity as to the proper course. Perhaps the village lights embarra.s.sed them, or perhaps the constant changes in the face of the country, from the clearings then going on, introduced into the landscape features not according with the ideal map handed down in the anserine family, and thus deranged its traditional geography.

[81] The cappercailzie, or tjader, as he is called in Sweden, is a bird of singular habits, and seems to want some of the protective instincts which secure most other wild birds from destruction. The younger Laestadius frequently notices the tjader, in his very remarkable account of the Swedish Laplanders--a work wholly unsurpa.s.sed as a genial picture of semi-barbarian life, and not inferior in minuteness of detail to Schlatter's description of the manners of the Nogai Tartars, or even to Lane's admirable and exhaustive work on the Modern Egyptians. The tjader, though not a bird of pa.s.sage, is migratory, or rather wandering in domicile, and appears to undertake very purposeless and absurd journeys. "When he flits," says Laestadius, "he follows a straight course, and sometimes pursues it quite out of the country. It is said that, in foggy weather, he sometimes flies out to sea, and, when tired, falls into the water and is drowned. It is accordingly observed that, when he flies westwardly, toward the mountains, he soon comes back again; but when he takes an eastwardly course, he returns no more, and for a long time is very scarce in Lapland. From this it would seem that he turns back from the bald mountains, when he discovers that he has strayed from his proper home, the wood; but when he finds himself over the Baltic, where he cannot alight to rest and collect himself, he flies on until he is exhausted and falls into the sea."--PETRUS LaeSTADIUS, _Journal af forsta ret, etc._, p. 325.

[82] _Die Herzogthumer Schleswig und Holstein_, i, p. 203.

[83] Gulls hover about s.h.i.+ps in port, and often far out at sea, diligently watching for the waste of the caboose. "While the four great fleets, English, French, Turkish, and Egyptian, were lying in the Bosphorus, in the summer and autumn of 1853, a young lady of my family called my attention to the fact that the gulls were far more numerous about the s.h.i.+ps of one of the fleets than about the others. This was verified by repeated observation, and the difference was owing no doubt to the greater abundance of the refuse from the cookrooms of the naval squadron most frequented by the birds. Persons acquainted with the economy of the navies of the states in question, will be able to conjecture which fleet was most favored with these delicate attentions.

[84] Birds do not often voluntarily take pa.s.sage on board s.h.i.+ps bound for foreign countries, but I can testify to one such case. A stork, which had nested near one of the palaces on the Bosphorus, had, by some accident, injured a wing, and was unable to join his follows when they commenced their winter migration to the banks of the Nile. Before he was able to fly again, he was caught, and the flag of the nation to which the palace belonged was tied to his leg, so that he was easily identified at a considerable distance. As his wing grow stronger, he made several unsatisfactory experiments at flight, and at last, by a vigorous effort, succeeded in reaching a pa.s.sing s.h.i.+p bound southward, and perched himself on a topsail yard. I happened to witness this movement, and observed him quietly maintaining his position as long as I could discern him with a spygla.s.s. I suppose he finished the voyage, for he certainly did not return to the palace.